A Higher Dose
by Grac3
Summary: Part four of the Volens!Verse. "To Sherlock, politics were much like his transport: he didn't need to pay attention to them until they began to fall apart." Diplomatic disasters are happening all around the world and Sherlock, watching from his hiding place, has to wonder why his brother isn't fixing them. It would seem that Moriarty isn't quiet as dead as he had first thought.
1. Diplomatic Disasters

**A.N.:** *WARNING! SPOILERS FOR SERIES 3 IN THIS AUTHOR'S NOTE* So, when I started writing this, I thought that it was going to be AU. By the time I finished writing it, Series 3 had already started and finished in the UK, and I realised that it wasn't quite as AU as I had thought... So... Yeah. Yay!

**Warning: **Spoilers for Series 3 in the second chapter.

**Disclaimer: Don't own Sherlock**

* * *

Chapter 1 – Diplomatic Disasters

To Sherlock, politics were much like his transport: he didn't need to pay attention to them until they began to fall apart. Five months after he had fallen off of the roof of St Bart's, that's exactly what seemed to be happening.

It started off small. Little stories of international disagreements that barely made the politics pages of the newspapers, things that were so infinitesimal that he didn't even let them get in the way of his hunt for the members of Moriarty's inner circle. After all, Mycroft would no doubt be sorting them all out.

As the weeks went on, however, the incidents seemed to snowball. Vicious international debates – although bitch fights might be a more accurate description – were sparking off all over the world. People were beginning to panic. Sherlock was finding it more and more difficult to ignore them.

Five months into his 'death', he was hiding in Scotland, following his second target. The first, Cook, he had _arranged_ to be picked up by border control agents as he tried to smuggle cocaine across countries, and he was now in prison. He had not wanted to start following Fletcher, his current target, until last, for he knew that in order to catch him, he would have to return to the UK. The thought of being in his home country when he couldn't return to his own life for so long was almost unbearable. However, an opportunity to catch Fletcher had presented itself and he would have been foolish to not pursue it.

By this time, he was living in a cave in the Highlands, trying to stay as far away from civilisation as possible. He had made sure that he was always connected to the news of the world in some shape or form, and so, as he read the story of the latest diplomatic disaster in the copy of the newspaper that a local homeless boy from the nearest town had stolen for him, he had to wonder why the world had descended into such avoidable chaos in the last few weeks.

It was not immediately clear that the crises had been caused by external forces. Most of them seemed to be deteriorations of already bitter relations, the kind of which his brother was paid to deal with. A few did not make their causes clear, but when he looked deeper into them, they had similar roots in international cattiness from months, years, even decades ago. It would seem like these problems were only a matter of time in coming, but they could just as easily have erupted into the public eye and threaten to damage relations long ago. Only one person could prevent these issues becoming the monumental problems that they were now, and that person didn't seem to be doing his job properly.

He was reading the final paragraph of the article when he was interrupted.

It started with a shuffle of feet at the mouth of the cave; he always opted to sit in a part of the cave where its mouth was hidden from him, so that if anyone was to pass by unexpectedly, they would not see that it had a resident – not that he was worried about such things, as it was terribly quiet this far away from the village – but it came with the added disadvantage that if people outside couldn't see him, then neither could he see people outside. He listened intently for whether or not the source of the shuffling would make itself known to him – after all, it could quite easily be just an animal of some kind – while nonchalantly pretending to be finishing the article.

The shuffles came nearer, until he was sure that two people were entering the cave. He did not look up from the paper.

"Sir?"

The voice that spoke was that of Tim, the boy who had been bringing him his newspapers during his stay in the Highlands. His presence at this time of day was enough to make Sherlock suspicious; usually, Tim would deliver the newspaper first thing in the morning and not return until the next day. What was more, the boy sounded scared, his voice wavering slightly.

Trying not to let his unease show on his face, Sherlock looked up from the newspaper. Tim was standing just inside the entrance of the cave, but he was not alone: standing next to the boy, with a gun held to his head, was Fletcher.

"Good afternoon, Mr Holmes," Fletcher grinned, revealing two rows of blindingly white teeth. Fletcher was as thickset as any bouncer, one muscular arm clamped around Tim's shoulders and pinning him to his side. He was wearing a cheap suit that was as black as his short, spiky hair, but those clothes were considerably less looked after than his teeth. "I found him on his way back to the village," he drawled, tightening his grip on Tim, who whimpered and clamped his eyes shut, "I think he belongs to you?"

Sherlock flicked his eyes imperceptibly to Tim, then black to Fletcher; the boy was scared, but he had no reason to believe that he was in any immediate danger – Fletcher would not harm Tim before he had told the detective what he wanted.

"Tim belongs to no one, and your quarrel is with me, not him. So you can let him go."

Fletcher's grin widened. "Oh, I will. When you agree to come with us."

Confused as he was at that statement, Sherlock did not let that show on his face. "'Us'?"

"Yeah," Fletcher nodded, straightening himself up to his full five foot eleven – one inch shorter than the detective, but what he lacked in height, he made up for in brawn. Sherlock wasn't going to try and get in a fight with him, especially not while he had a gun and _definitely_ not in front of Tim. "The boss and I have something we think you ought to see."

"Your boss?" Sherlock asked. "You no longer have a boss. In case the news hasn't reached you this far north yet, James Moriarty is dead."

Then, from just out of sight of the detective, came a sing-song voice that sent shivers down Sherlock's spine.

"But we both know that's not quite true!"

Moriarty stepped into the cave, obviously having been waiting just out of sight for the right moment to appear, his hands buried in the pockets of his dark grey Westwood suit – which was impeccable despite the rough terrain he would have had to cross to reach the cave.

Sherlock felt like he was dreaming; Moriarty was dead, he had shot himself right before his eyes. If throwing yourself off of a building and surviving was difficult – and it most assuredly was – then faking shooting yourself in the face must have been near impossible.

Yet, it would seem, that it was possible indeed.

Sherlock slowly lowered the newspaper to the floor and stood, regarding Moriarty's grinning face. It infuriated him to see the criminal alive, not to mention looking so bloody cocky.

"And call me Jim, please, Sherlock; James was my father."

"How are you alive?" Sherlock growled, taking a step closer to Moriarty, for the most part forgetting about Fletcher and Tim.

"I could ask you the same thing. Maybe I'll have to call my snipers back into action."

"You dare-"

Moriarty cut him off with an annoying laugh, throwing his head back. When he looked back at Sherlock, the grin had faded into a small smile.

"Don't worry, I've already done that once, and repetition is so _boring_. No, I have something new going on, and I know you'll love to see how I did it."

Sherlock exhaled slowly, letting the rage go before adopting a more nonchalant pose. "You're behind all of the breakdowns in diplomacy over the past few weeks."

Moriarty chuckled. "Oh, I'd love to take credit for those, but they were all ready to go anyway. All I had to do was push 'play'."

"And you found the button."

"Yes." Moriarty took his hands out of his pockets and clasped them behind his back. He leaned forward and whispered, in a tone mocking the one you would use to speak to a child, "Guessed what it is yet?"

Off the top of his head, Sherlock could think of three buttons that Moriarty could have pressed to set off the worldwide bitch fights, but he had no way of knowing which one had been used.

"No?" he asked teasingly. "Oh dear, Sherlock, you're slipping. Is this what living in a cave does to you?" He laughed again, and the sound grated on Sherlock's nerves. "Well, I suppose I'll have to show you," Moriarty sighed exasperatedly, as though taking the time out to explain what he had done was an irritating waste of his time. He looked over at Fletcher. "Let him go."

Fletcher let go of Tim, who backed three feet away from the man as he retrained his gun on Sherlock. The boy stood looking from Fletcher to Sherlock with a terrified expression.

"Go, Tim," Sherlock ordered, his eyes still on Moriarty.

"But-" Tim squeaked.

"Go!"

Tim whimpered and scampered out of the cave, with any sense heading back to the village – where he would tell no one of what he had seen.

When Tim's footsteps had faded away into the distance, Moriarty turned his back on Sherlock and began to walk away. Fletcher stood still, his gun still raised.

"Come now, Sherlock!" Moriarty called back when he was already out of sight.

Knowing that he didn't really have a choice, Sherlock scowled and headed for the mouth of the cave. Fletcher followed him with the gun, keeping it trained at his head, until he had passed and he could follow behind.

When Sherlock reached the mouth of the cave, he saw a van sitting about twenty feet into the field beyond. As he already had a head start on them, Moriarty was the first to reach it. The criminal opened the back doors of the van and pulled a piece of cloth and a glass bottle that looked like it was from a 19th Century chemist's laboratory from the inside, complete with parchment label written on with ink applied with a quill. He took out the glass cork from the neck of the bottle and tipped some of the clear contents onto the cloth, before replacing the cork, pocketing the bottle and standing back.

When Sherlock reached the back of the van, Moriarty gestured for him to sit down.

"Have a seat, Sherlock."

Sherlock looked from the van to Moriarty. "I prefer to stand."

Behind him, Fletcher took the safety off of the gun.

Scowling at Moriarty, Sherlock turned and sat on the edge of the van, his legs dangling off of the edge, his back perfectly straight.

Moriarty offered him the cloth with a smile. "We can't have you knowing where we're going, can we? Don't worry, I've given you a higher dose; after all, it takes slightly more to knock out a vampire, doesn't it?"

His scowl became a glare. How did Moriarty know what he was? To his knowledge, the criminal himself was not a vampire – but then again, he hadn't known that Irene was a vampire. He had to have answers, and, no matter how much it irked him that this was the case, the only way that he was going to get them was to do exactly as Moriarty told him to.

He took the cloth and grimaced slightly at the sickly smell that reached his nose. With one last look at Fletcher, who still had his gun raised at him, he lifted the cloth to his face and inhaled.

It was merely a split second before a wave of drowsiness washed over him, the world became blurry and his thoughts disjointed. He was vaguely aware of falling back against the floor of the van, as the whole world went black…

~{G}~

He was brought back to consciousness with a wave of nausea. He bit back a groan as he squeezed his eyes shut tighter to fight against the feeling, counting slowly in his head until it passed.

He had expected to awaken to find himself tied to a chair, but he could not feel that he was sitting on anything other than the floor. His back was pressed up against something solid and much taller than he; he guessed that he had been propped up against a wall. His legs were stretched out in front of him, and his hands were lying limp at his sides.

Being unconscious, his head had lolled onto his chest. He lifted it, wincing slightly as the stiffness of his neck protested. While he had not seemed to have been restrained in any way – not even his legs felt as though they had been tied together – his entire body had locked itself into position while he was asleep, and was violently making him aware of the fact that it did not wish to be moved. He moved each of his limbs in turn, bending his legs at the knees, and his arms at the elbows.

With his limbs aching but beginning to forgive him, he slowly cracked his eyes open to see where he had been taken.

He was in a dank, dark room that he assumed was a basement. There was harsh artificial light overhead that made no resemblance to natural light; while the walls and the floor looked a murky brown, he found himself doubting whether or not they actually were that colour.

Apart from the lights, the room appeared to be completely empty. There were no chairs, or tables, or any single piece of furniture. There were, however, two doors. One, on the wall to the left of him, was plain and had a boring, standard handle protruding from the middle of the left hand side. Sherlock assumed that this was the door that he had been brought through. The other, on the wall to his right and directly opposite the first, appeared to be more heavy duty. From where he was sat, the door appeared to have been made out of rusted metal, and while it had a window – unlike the first had – the glass was covered with a thick set of metal mesh.

Turning his head to his right – and ignoring his neck's pain – he saw that there was one other thing in the room: a large freezer that was plugged into the wall, humming quietly to itself.

He had only been awake for about five minutes when the door to his left opened, and his captors entered the room.

"Ah, you're awake!" Moriarty grinned. Fletcher followed in behind him and stood perfectly still and silent, his hands behind his back. "You hungry?"

Moriarty crossed the room to the freezer and opened it, taking out a handful of blood bags before closing the lid. He had not had to reach down to take them, so the freezer must have been full to the brim. Just how long was he planning on keeping him here?

The criminal dropped the blood bags on the floor by Sherlock's side; the detective looked up at him from the floor, still glaring.

"What?" Moriarty asked, in a mock tone of indignation, ruined by the wide grin on his face. "They're perfectly safe. Do you really think that if I was going to kill you, I would use something as mundane as _poison_?"

Sherlock eyed the blood bags with suspicion, but he had to admit that, if Moriarty was going to kill him, this isn't how he would do it – it wasn't his style. Besides, he hadn't eaten for a week – blood bags were not that easy to come by when you were living in a cave in the Highlands, and he found that he had not been as partial to hunting since he had acquired a volens – and he was in desperate need of sustenance. He reached forward to the blood bags and opened one. The metallic smell rose to his nostrils and made him begin to salivate; his fangs nipped at his bottom lip and he drank the entire pint in one go, before moving on to the other three.

When he had lowered the final blood bag to the floor, empty, the haze that had taken over all of his senses since the delicious crimson had first touched his tongue dissipated; he heard Moriarty chuckling in the background.

"Wow!" the criminal breathed, sounding genuinely enthralled.

Now feeling stronger than he had since he had fallen, Sherlock pushed himself to his feet.

"How do you know what I am?" he growled.

Moriarty giggled. "Now, now, I'll explain everything in time…"

"No," Sherlock said, taking a step closer to the criminal. "How do you know about vampires?"

The criminal didn't answer right away; he smiled sickeningly, the kind of smile that he wore when he felt superior. "Well, that's a different question," he purred. "Did you know that Irene is a vampire?"

The memory of that night in the morgue flashed into his head, and he scowled to himself. "I did."

"Ah, but not until recently! I worked it out before you, _long_ before you. And it was most fascinating news."

Moriarty began pacing the space before Sherlock, settling into his story-telling mode.

"When we first started working together, she managed to overpower me and sink her teeth into my neck," he explained, raising his hand to brush his fingertips over the skin of his throat, seemingly absentmindedly. "Once I knew that vampires existed, I decided to do some research, and I found myself… disappointed. I mean, real-life vampires are hardly as interesting as the ones in books and movies, are they? I mean, you're not even immortal. You don't even _sparkle_!" He giggled again.

"I wouldn't find out that you and your dear brother are vampires until I was let go from my imprisonment, but by the time I was put in that cell, I had already begun to find out as much as I can about vampires.

"When I found out about volens…" He turned to look at Sherlock, an expression of glee on his face. "Oh, how wonderful that was! I _begged_ Miss Adler to let me be hers, but she wouldn't agree… I had planned to get my revenge on her by having her beheaded, but you ruined that for me, so, never mind.

"When I was set free, I continued my research, but eventually, I got bored. Now, usually, when I get bored, I kill someone, but I'm dead, and dead men can't kill people – at least not without raising some suspicion. So I decided to take a leaf out of your book! Do you see where this is going?"

Sherlock said nothing.

"I experimented!" Moriarty exclaimed, holding his arms wide and leaning forward slightly. "Still am, actually. You see, I wanted to see just how long it would take a vampire to starve to death." He began to back away from Sherlock, heading for the heavy duty door on the far side of the basement. With a sinking feeling, Sherlock thought he knew what was beyond that door…

"All I needed was a guinea pig. And if I could cause some extra mayhem in the world, then that was just _wonderful_." Moriarty waved his hand at Sherlock when he reached the far wall, beckoning the detective to the door.

Sherlock walked forwards, not looking at Moriarty as he reached the metal mesh over the window on the door. When he was close enough, he reached up to curl his fingers around the metal.

Looking through the mesh, he saw that the room beyond the door was not truly a room at all – it was a cell. The floor was dusty and dirty, and the only real feature was a trapezoidal protrusion on the left wall.

And, chained to the vertical part of the trapezium with his head tilted back against its slope, was Mycroft.


	2. Voracious Vampires

**Warning: **Spoilers for Series 3.

**Disclaimer: Don't own Sherlock**

* * *

Chapter 2 – Voracious Vampires

Sherlock had never seen a vampire look so starved before. His brother was practically transparent; his entire body was impossibly thin, his clothes hanging off of him, and his chest heaved laboriously as he struggled to breathe. His eyes were closed as his head rested against the slope on the wall, but his eyelids were fluttering slightly; he was obviously conscious, but did not have the energy to open them. He couldn't even close his mouth, because he would pierce himself with his permanently elongated fangs.

Sherlock had never hated Moriarty more.

"This is what you did," he breathed, unable to take his eyes off of Mycroft. "This is why the world is falling apart."

"Yes," Moriarty confirmed, sounding unbearably smug. "He's the button. And if I can get to you as well… Well, that's just a bonus."

Sherlock let go of the mesh covering the window and turned slowly to Moriarty. The criminal was still smiling. The detective wanted to punch him.

"You've kept him locked up for six weeks?" he asked, his voice low and dangerous. He knew that he wouldn't really be able to touch the criminal, not with Fletcher right there. The man was holding himself in an awkward manner, a manner that suggested that he still had a gun on him, and Sherlock knew that he would be no help to Mycroft if he had a bullet in him.

"I'm actually surprised no one could find him all this time," Moriarty mused. "Then again, I suppose the only person good enough to find him, is… him."

Sherlock felt sick. "Have you been starving him this entire time?"

Moriarty nodded slowly, an exaggerated thoughtful look on his face, his eyes fixed on the far corner of the room. "That was the experiment, after all. And how _fascinating_ it has been," he chuckled. "You should have been there when the hallucinations started, they were _hilarious_! Then, a few days later…" Moriarty trailed off, staring off into space as though he was remembering a fond childhood memory.

"Tell me, Sherlock," he began with an evil smile as he looked back at the detective, "have you ever heard your brother _beg_?"

A low growl sounded in the detective's throat. He didn't remember ever being this infuriated before. He wanted to attack the criminal, to sink his fangs into his flesh in the most agonising way possible, to hear him _scream_…

Yet he knew that, as long as Fletcher was there with his gun, Moriarty was safe. After all, if anything happened to Sherlock now, Mycroft was dead.

Moriarty chuckled knowingly, no doubt aware of the position that he had managed to put Sherlock in. He had the upper hand in a way that he had never really had before, and it would seem that he was determined to savour it.

The only thing that Sherlock could really do was to try and play for time and hope that an opportunity would present itself for him to incapacitate both Moriarty and Fletcher, and to get Mycroft out of that cell and out of those archaic, barbaric chains.

"You explained how you know that vampires exist," Sherlock began, changing the subject to try and reign in his rage to a minimum, but he found that he could not completely banish it. "How did you know what my brother and I are vampires?"

Moriarty stood perfectly still for a moment, a smile still playing on his lips.

"Oh, Sherlock," he simpered eventually. "You really aren't careful enough, are you?"

He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out two A4 sheets of what looked like photo paper, the kind used for surveillance in police investigations. He handed the first over to the detective, who took it wordlessly, and balked at the sight of it.

It was him.

The picture had been taken – presumably from a CCTV camera – in the dark, at the end of an alleyway. Sherlock was leaning against the wall of the alley, looking pale and wan.

Sherlock recognised the moment instantly. The picture had been taken near the end of the diamante case, when his reckless behaviour had set off the chain of events which had resulted in him gaining a volens.

The diamante case had been a difficult one. Not long – for, at two weeks, it was only a third of the length of his longest case to date – nor was it particularly difficult to solve, for he had narrowed it down to three suspects after seven days, and the rest of the time was merely tracking them all down so that he could determine exactly which one was the culprit.

No, it had been difficult because he had been so _hungry_.

As usual, he had drained his entire supply of blood bags when he had received the call from Lestrade telling him that he had a case for him. There hadn't been many, not nearly enough to ensure that he could handle a two-week starvation; although, he hadn't known at the time that the case would last so long.

The result of this had been that he was beginning to succumb to his hunger earlier than he might have done had he had more blood bags. Before the three-week case shortly after the conclusion of the diamante case, he had had enough blood bags to nearly tide him over, and by the time he tasted fresh blood for the first time in he couldn't remember how long, he was not nearly as starving as he had been at the time of this photo being taken.

The loss of control was evident in the picture he now held in his fingers. The version of himself that was printed on the paper was not merely one of a hungry vampire, although all the signs of famishment – pale complexion, skeletal face, bags under his eyes – were present; it was the vision of a vampire who was in desperate need of blood, one who was close to either attacking someone, or shutting down altogether.

His mouth was slightly open, and his breath was visible in a cloud before his face due to the unseasonable cold snap that London had been experiencing when they had been investigating the diamante case. And in the gap between his lips, two pearly-white fangs were visible.

Sherlock had found that his fangs had been harder to keep hidden when he reached the levels of hunger that case starvation had driven him to. In hindsight, he realised just how vital it was that he acquired a stable and reliable source of blood when he did, and he knew that he would always be grateful to John for agreeing to be that source.

It was also hindsight that told him how incredibly stupid he had been in those times before he had got a volens, and just how fast and loose he had been playing with the secret of his true nature. Anyone could have seen him when he was fighting to keep his fangs hidden – and, it would seem, anyone _had_ seen.

"How did you get this?" Sherlock breathed, not looking up from the picture.

"You should know, a good criminal never reveals his sources," Moriarty practically sang. "But you can't _imagine_ the glee I felt when I found out that you were one of these _charming_ creatures yourself."

Sherlock's head snapped up to the criminal, only to notice that Moriarty's eyes had dropped to his mouth, and he felt his skin crawl. His fangs were part of who he was, an intimate part of his identity that he rarely shared with anyone. To know that Moriarty had seen them…

It was almost enough to make him back away from the criminal out of sheer revulsion. To Sherlock, the photo in his hands was the equivalent of one taken of him in the shower.

Moriarty took a sharp breath, meeting Sherlock's eyes with his own as though he was bringing himself back to reality.

"By the time I found that photo, I was out of the custody of your _dear brother_," he continued, the last two words spoken with spite, "and you already had a volens." He held out the other photo to Sherlock, who took it.

Sherlock's eyes widened at the sight of the second photo.

On some level, this was worse than the first.

This second photo had been taken just outside of Bart's, but it wasn't of Sherlock; his coat was just visible as it whipped out of sight through the door of the hospital, but there was no other sign of his presence.

The main subject of the photo was John.

John was holding the door open for the detective to enter the hospital, and his sleeve had rucked up his arm as he reached forward to the door handle, making his wrist visible – making two, ugly red bite marks visible against his milky skin.

Sherlock knew exactly what day this photo had been taken on. The case had lasted for two days, and Sherlock was confident that he could last to its conclusion without feeding. But John, good John, had insisted; he had learned the signs of the detective's hunger since he had become his volens – even though their relationship had only shifted to the more serious level a few weeks before – and could tell that he needed a top up. John was incredibly good to him; Sherlock had missed him over these last few months.

The detective had drank quickly and rushed out the door, determined to get to Bart's as quickly as possible so that he could perform the final experiment that would close the case once and for all, and had not wanted to waste any time letting John get a bandage with which to cover the bite marks. It was the day that they had gone to the hospital and Sherlock had discovered that a vampire – Irene, no less – had been feeding off of Molly.

In his haste, he had honestly believed that John would be fine leaving the marks uncovered. After all, he had been wearing long sleeves, and it was too cold to roll them up.

It would seem that he had been wrong.

He didn't like being wrong.

"I confess, I was kind of sad that you already had a volens," Moriarty drawled. "After Irene rejected me, you were my first choice of vampire." The criminal paused, sighing in disappointment. "But you were already taken.

"Naturally, I tried to find out everything I could about volens, but there is a lot of false information out there. The vampire community sure likes to cover its tracks, doesn't it? Well, certainly more than you do, Sherlock…" he chuckled, gesturing to the photos in Sherlock's hands.

Ignoring the detective's growl, Moriarty continued.

"But I think I found some valid information. The bond is particularly interesting. Tell me, Sher-" Sherlock grimaced at the nickname, and Moriarty lowered his voice to a mocking whisper, "have you fallen in love with Johnny boy yet?"

Sherlock said nothing, keeping the scowl firmly fixed on his face. Moriarty laughed.

"Of _course_ not," he snickered, "I mean, you only _died_ for him!"

"And Mrs Hudson. And Lestrade," Sherlock added.

"But not your brother," Moriarty mused, cocking his head to the side with an amused expression on his face. "You didn't even question why there was no sniper trained on him when we were on that rooftop."

"I thought that you wouldn't be able to get to him," Sherlock explained, not mentioning how Mycroft had been part of the plan all along. "He has rather good security."

"Well, not good enough," Moriarty countered, shifting his eyes from side to side. "After all, I got him here, didn't I? And no one's even found him yet; although, I assure you, they have been looking, which is more than you've been doing. Some brother you are."

Sherlock turned his head to his left, looking through the mesh over the window at the body of his brother which was slowly grinding to a halt before his eyes. His inhales were audible as the air rattled through his parched and dry mouth, over his aching fangs and into his struggling lungs.

"Anyway," Moriarty said in a tone of finality, "I have some business to attend to." He reached into his pocket and pulled out two large keys held together by a single key ring, and threw them at Sherlock who caught them with deft fingers, dropping the photos in the process.

"What are these?" he asked in disbelief, staring at the keys in his hands.

"One for the cell, the other for the chains," Moriarty explained distractedly as he walked toward the other door and gestured for Fletcher to follow him.

"What about your experiment?" Sherlock called to them as they left the basement.

"Boring!"

The door to the outside world shut behind the two criminals, and Sherlock found himself alone with a set of keys, his starved brother, and a humming freezer full of blood bags. A part of him was suspicious that this was a trap.

A bigger part of him was worried about the state of the vampire chained up in the cell.

Throwing caution to the wind, he turned round on his heel, fumbling with the key as he tried to put it in the lock. The lock to the door was large and ancient, while he could see through the window that the chains – while strong and thick – had a relatively small lock. He had worked out which key fit which lock within seconds, but the lock to the cell was stiff; there was every possibility that it had not been opened for six weeks.

Sherlock wrestled against the lock, becoming more frustrated with every second that passed that it stubbornly refused to accept its key. Eventually, it gave way with a loud, dull _clunk_, and he wrenched the door open.

Mycroft's brow creased slightly in pain at the noise, but he didn't seem to have enough energy to do anything else. He gulped instinctively at the knowledge of someone else being in the cell with him, but Sherlock wasn't sure how much that his brother was aware of in his current state.

Sherlock dropped to his knees by his brother's side, examining the lock on the chains. The chains were attached to the wall by two thick metal rings embedded in the stone. The chains cuffed around his wrists – probably too tightly and digging in – were holding his arms out to his sides, so that he couldn't lower them properly. There was a lock for each chain, but presumably the same key would fit both.

As Sherlock unlocked the first chain, Mycroft gave no sign of knowing that he was being released – that small forehead crinkle had been the only acknowledgement of the presence of another. He gasped slightly, in pain, as the first chain came free, and his arm dropped back down to his side. Sherlock walked around him to unlock the second. When that arm dropped, Mycroft made no sound at all.

Apprehensively, Sherlock checked his pulse. It was barely there, a small tap against the inside of his skin every so often.

This was Not Good.

This was very Not Good.

"Mycroft," he murmured, trying to get some reaction. "Mycroft."

Mycroft took in a deep breath, the air rattling around his hollow form. Slowly, and apparently with great effort, he lifted his head off of the slope and peeled his eyes open. They fell on Sherlock, blank, empty, weak. There was no recognition within them.

They dropped from Sherlock's face, fixing on a single point in the detective's neck, and, by the time Sherlock knew what was happening, he had been pinned to the floor.

Mycroft was probably the weakest he had ever been; his thin figure did not have much weight to it, but he was not strong enough to support what little there was of him, and Sherlock, who probably would need more than the four blood bags that Moriarty had given him to return to his full strength, could not move from underneath him.

He yelled in pain as a pair of fangs sank as deep as they could into his throat, feeding aggressively as the blood poured from the wound and into the vampire's mouth. It was rare for a vampire to feed off of another – usually, if a vampire was hunting and accidentally preyed on another, the one who had been mistaken for a human would stop them before anything happened – but it was not unheard of. Many vampires were told that it was impossible, that vampires simply couldn't feed off of one another. In reality, it was more to do with etiquette than ability, but even so, it wasn't a good idea.

As the blood flowed out of his body, Sherlock felt himself weakening. He was kept from slipping into unconsciousness by the agony of having what felt like two skewers stuck into the side of his neck. His own fangs elongated in his mouth, begging him to replace the blood that he was losing. They strained against his gums, pulling against them until they felt as though they were going to be ripped from his mouth. His baser instincts began to take over: attack, defend, survive…

He fought against them. After all, if Mycroft was this desperate, he needed the blood more than Sherlock did.

He gasped as he felt the fangs slide out of his neck, and a coarse, dry tongue run along the wounds to heal them. Shakily, Mycroft pushed himself up and looked into his face.

Recognition dawned within his eyes, and they widened.

"Sherlock…" he breathed, looking terrified. He pushed himself up and away, looking disgusted with himself. He leaned back against the wall and curled his hands into his hair and pulled, threatening to rip chunks out of his scalp, shaking his head.

Sherlock, still lying on the floor, unable to move, could not speak for a few moments.

"Mycroft," he began, his voice croaky. His neck ached as it was disturbed by the vibrations of his vocal chords. "There is a freezer in the other room." He managed to turn his head, but Mycroft hadn't moved; he didn't seem to have heard him. "Mycroft!"

Mycroft looked up, his hands still on his head. His expression was still one of shock and horror.

"The freezer. There are… blood bags."

Another moment passed in silence. Mycroft remained where he was.

"Go!" Sherlock shouted, and all of a sudden, Mycroft seemed to snap out of his stupor. Pushing himself to his feet, he left the cell. From where he was lying on the floor, Sherlock heard the freezer opening and the distinct squishing sound of blood bags being handled. A moment later, Mycroft returned, arms laden with the bags.

He dumped them unceremoniously on the floor before sliding his hands under Sherlock's back and helping him to sit up. He handed him a blood bag, which the detective gratefully accepted, and for the next few minutes they fed earnestly. Sherlock had to make another two trips to the freezer before they were completely satisfied, but eventually they dropped their empty blood bags on the floor and let the drowsiness of having recently fed well wash over them.

It was a moment before either of them had the energy to speak.

"How did Moriarty manage to kidnap you? I thought you were supposed to have such good protection?" Sherlock asked, leaning back against the trapezoidal protrusion on the wall, well away from the chains that still hung limply from the metal rings.

Mycroft sighed, looking down at the floor. He looked absolutely shattered. "It was an… error… on my part," he whispered, his voice shattered by weeks of screaming punctuated with long periods of silence. "I had a lunch a mere few minutes away from the office, and I decided to walk rather than drive. One gets terribly tired of the interior of cars."

"You were snatched off the street?"

Mycroft nodded, and Sherlock had to admit that Moriarty had a certain level of skill when it came to what he did.

"Anthea must be going spare."

A look of pain flashed across Mycroft's face. It did not go unnoticed by Sherlock.

"You miss her," the detective noted, unable to not sound slightly amused.

"Of course I do!" Mycroft snapped, looking up at his brother sharply.

Sherlock chuckled at that. It was a strange feeling, to laugh again after all this time. After five months of solitude, of having no other relationships other than those that were professionally necessary, Sherlock realised that he had missed such simple things as laughter. He remembered the days when months would go by when he would only interact with humans on a professional basis, and in all those years, that fact had never once perturbed him in the slightest.

Maybe John Watson had had a greater effect on him than he had first realised.

Maybe he was becoming… human.

Well, as human as a vampire could be.

It would seem that Mycroft, too, had missed the simple things during his weeks of captivity and starvation. After a few moments of merely looking an amusing mixture of incredulous and fearful that he had just witnessed his younger brother lose his mind in front of him, the corners of his own mouth began to twitch in a smile, until he, too, was chuckling slightly.

As time passed, the chuckles became sincere laughter, which became guffaws, which became total, uncontrollable, and incredibly loud outbursts of mirth. The joyful sounds echoed off of the walls of the cell that before had only known the sounds of screams. It was only when tears began to run down their cheeks and they clutched their abdomens painfully that they stopped, gasping for air and leaning against the wall and the floor respectively.

There was a moment of silence, an agreement that what had just happened between them was an anomaly, a break from the norm that would only be acceptable once in a lifetime. The shift back to their usual stoic selves was so abrupt it was as though someone had flicked an invisible switch between them.

"Moriarty being alive is rather problematic," Mycroft commented, pushing himself against the opposite wall.

"Indeed," Sherlock sighed, nudging one of the empty blood bags absentmindedly with his foot. "I can still dismantle his network. Without that, he might be forced to go underground for a few months."

_For long enough for me to get back to John._

_Long enough for me to go after Magnussen._

"But he will be back."

Sherlock met his brother's eyes. "And I will be ready for him."

* * *

**A.N.:** I have planned the next part of the Volens!Verse, which will be a fluffy oneshot set in the three-month silence between the Trail and the Fall. It will be centred around Mycroft and Anthea (or Ruth, as is her name in this AU), but I don't know when it will be posted.

**A.N.2:** I have also made a timeline on TimeToast which has all of the events of the Volens!Verse on it, and the link to it is on my profile. It does have all of the events from all of the stories, and will be updated with new events every time I write a new story in this Verse.


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